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The Playfulness of Coding

I miss those days of when I first discovered Rails and Ruby. I was in awe of their simplicity and effectiveness. That feeling of: “wow, it can’t be this much fun, can it?”

I used to love hacking with Rails, hoping that one day I would stop writing convoluted Java server apps and get an opportunity to write a "real" Rails app.

Nine years ago I wrote:

Its easy to see why… RoR cuts through so much of the redtape that’s associated with frameworks such as J2EE, or even .Net. The Ruby language itself is bit tougher to get to grips with. It has some mannerism that can be currently best described as strange, compared to the stuff I’m used to, i.e. Python & Java. I say “currently” because I’m still learning these mannerisms and fromwhat I’ve read its supposed to be an amazing programming language, once the penny drops.
-- Hoopla

Somewhere along the road Rails lost that childlike nature. Web applications lost their childlike nature. Today we have micro services, single page JavaScript apps, API servers, DevOps.

I've spoken to a few erstwhile Rails developers that hark back to those ’heady Rails 2.x days’. I feel likewise. I lost interest in Rails 4.x (turbo links ?) and don’t event ask my what’s new in Rails 5 or when its going to be released (has it?).

Sure, I love coding in Go. Yes, Go is productive - but it feels like work, not play. Emberjs is the same: work, not play. Let's not even start on DevOps. Swift, meh. Node, meh.

The world seems more complicated now.

The closest I’ve come recently to feeling like I did in 2006 has been with ReactNative.